86-year prison term for Dr. Siddiqui: Victory in Courtroom is Loss on Worldwide Public Stage
By: Houston Criminal Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
This website has maintained an ongoing interest in the bizarre case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui (hereand here). We have stated we do not know if the Pakistani native is a brilliant neuroscientist or an al Qaeda terrorist as our Government has repeatedly charged she is. What we do know is that our Government has cloaked the Siddiqui case in such mystery and secrecy that we believe she was most likely kidnapped, along with her three children, by Pakistan’s infamous intelligence agency in Karachi in 2003 and turned over to our Government who placed her in secret detention in Bagram military prison in Afghanistan where she was subjected to torture and other forms of debilitating abuse.
Just months after U.S. District Court Judge Richard M. Berman, sitting in the Southern District of New York, imposed an 86-year prison term on Dr. Siddiqui following her conviction for shooting American military personnel after her detention in Ghanzi, Afghanistan in July 2008, the highly publicized and controversial WikiLeaks disclosures of U.S. State Department classified cables has reawaken what the British newspaper, The Guardian, calls “one of the most vexed mysteries of the Bush-era ‘war on terror’.”
One cable from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, dated July 31, 2008 (two weeks after Siddiqui’s capture in Afghanistan), stated: “Bagram officials have assured us that they have not been holding Siddiqui for the last four years, as has been alleged.” Earlier cables from the embassy in February addressed the widespread public protest and outrage in Pakistan following Siddiqui’s conviction in February 2010. At that time U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson charged the protests were the result of “one-sided” media coverage in Pakistan about the case.
The mystery surrounding Dr. Siddiqui’s strange disappearance from Karachi in 2003 assumed an international life form in 2008 when, according to the Peace thru Justice Foundation, four men escaped from the Bagram prison and began to share stories about a Pakistani woman known as “Prisoner 650” who had been repeatedly subjected to torture and physical abuse at the hands of U.S. Government and military personnel. After a British citizen named Binyan Mohamed was released from U.S. secret detention, he positively identified a photograph of Dr. Siddiqui as “Prisoner 650.” The Prisoner 650/Dr. Siddiqui story was picked up by British journalist Yvonne Ridley who coined her as the “Gray Lady of Bagram.” The “Gray Lady” term was employed because Ridley said “Prisoner 650” appeared to be a “ghost” by all those who saw her and heard her screams echoing following torture sessions at the infamous Bagram prison.
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